Entertainment

6 Embeddable HTML Editors for Your Website Compared

Not many Web sites allow you to create your own pages, but many do allow you to create segments of HTML. What if you wanted to allow this on your own site? Do you write your own editor? Well, with the capabilities offered by these six embedded HTML editors, there really is no need to write your own.

If you already use embeddable HTML editors, tell us more about your experiences with them in the comments.

WYMEditor

URL:http://www.wymeditor.orgRequired Libraries: Distributed with jQuery 1.1.3 Extensibility: Plugin creation available Markup Validation: Produces strict XHTML Code View: Dual pane code view License: MIT & GPL licensing Support and Community: Forums Ease of Configuration: Easy configuration, only a few lines of javascript are needed. Theme/Skin support: Skinnable, and creating a custom skin based on the default skins is simple. Verdict: It is a fairly easy editor to setup, skin and customize. The plugin capabilities are fairly limited, but do give you enough to modify the edited text.

TinyMCE

URL:http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/ Required Libraries: Distributed with Scriptaculous, and you need to load tiny_mce.js before any other scriptaculous.js includes. Extensibility: Plugin creation available Markup Validation: No validation or standards compliant code generation. Code View: Code view appears in a popup License: LGPL Support and Community: Forums Ease of Configuration: Easy to setup a standard installation, but the configuration gets a little harder when you start including more plugins. Theme/Skin support: Themes and skins can be created. Verdict: TinyMCE is probably the best known of the group, as it is the main editor for WordPress. It has advanced table editing like merge or split rows and columns. Overall, it is very powerful. However, there is no guarantee that it generates quality XHTML or even standard HTML, mainly because of the ability to customize the HTML output.

Kupu

URL:http://kupu.oscom.org/ Required Libraries: None Extensibility: Extension creation available. Markup Validation: Creates well-formed XML Code View: Code view with div switching License: Free, copyright Support and Community: There is minimal documentation and a developer mailing list Ease of Configuration: Configuration of Kupu is difficult. The examples use a lot of code to create the buttons and toolbars in addition to the general configuration. Theme/Skin support: Skins are supported, but the limited documentation makes it difficult to create. Verdict: Kupu runs under IE or FireFox only. It seems meant to be the main editor for a CMS as it takes over the entire page. The configuration (or just the example) is very hard to figure out, but the example works right out of the box.

CB RTE

URL:http://www.kevinroth.com/rte/ Required Libraries: None Extensibility: No plugin or extension framework available. Markup Validation: Generates XHTML Code View: Code view with div switching when clicking a checkbox License: Creative Commons Support and Community: There is minimal documentation, almost none. Ease of Configuration: Very easy configuration, mainly because not much can be changed. Theme/Skin support: RTE is not skinnable, you can replace the standard stylesheet Verdict: RTE has a very minimalist user interface. There is no customization or extension model. Otherwise, it is a bare bones HTML editor.

Xinha

URL:http://xinha.webfactional.com/ Required Libraries: None Extensibility: Plugin creation available Markup Validation: Produces valid XHTML code Code View: Code view with div switching License: BSD-based Support and Community: Forums Ease of Configuration: Moderately difficult configuration as there are a lot of possible options. Theme/Skin support: Skinnable, and creating a custom skin based on the default skins is simple. Verdict: Xinha (pronounced Xena) must be installed on a server, so it does not work on a local file. It has advanced table editing like merging and splitting rows and columns.

NicEdit

URL:http://nicedit.com/ Required Libraries: None Extensibility: Plugin creation available Markup Validation: Produces valid XHTML code Code View: Code view with a hover div License: MIT Support and Community: Forums Ease of Configuration: Easy configuration as there are not many options to change. Theme/Skin support: NicEdit is not skinnable, but you can replace the default stylesheet. Verdict: No table editing is available as it is meant to be a simpler editor, and the author notes that the html generation is bad.

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